Starhawk 1.04 drops September 25th 2012

Thursday, September 20, 2012 At 11:51AM
The wait is finally over! On September 25th the Starhawk 1.04 Update will be available for download! 1.04 is a huge update with a ton of brand new free content including 5 new maps and 3 new modes, balance changes, bug fixes and DLC purchasable from the PlayStation Store. This is by far our most ambitious Update to date and one that has been in the works for quite awhile. So without further ado here are the new features you’ll get to experience with the Update!Five New Maps:We’ve always said all of the new maps we make for Starhawk will be free and 1.04 makes good on that promise. We know you wanted some smaller maps and we’ve delivered. These small maps are great when you have less players and really shine in the new Deathmatch mode too. Add them to your CTF, Zones, DM or TDM game lists. We also included two new Hawk only maps to liven up your aerial combat.

Cypress Glade:In 1.03 we introduced the lush, green (and swampy!) environment of Cypress and included two brand new maps for this new planet. Now with the addition of small maps we’ve got one more for you, the tiny islands of Glade. This small map incorporates the gnarly tree roots and expanded pickup locations of the previous maps that were a big hit with players in 1.03 with a more compact layout for intese battles!Space Relay:The second small map in this update takes the fight to the tiny Relay station above the planet Dust. There are a lot of tiered walkways on this map: perfect places to get the advantage on the players below you while they are distracted and shooting at someone else.Scourge Junction:Our final small map, Scourge Junction, is a derelict extraction site full of Crumbling bridges connecting the islands. Vehicles with vertical mobility are key to victory here, just don’t run out of fuel and fall into the acid below! Scourge Breaker:This new map for Gatekeeper and Dogfight takes you back to a previously unseen area on Scourge where you can riddle your target with fire from your Hawk.Space Flotilla:Ships and asteroids orbit Dust in high concentrations here. Use the asteroids for cover and fly through the ship cargo bays to grab pickups in this new map for Gatekeeper and Dogfight modes! Three New Game Modes:We’re always thinking about how we can take the core Starhawk gameplay experience and build upon it. These three new game modes are a direct result of extensive internal gameplay sessions and discussions combined with player requests.

Assault:In this territory control mode the teams are split up into attacker and defender. The attacking team starts at one end of the map with a single drop zone and must capture each of the defending teams control points in order. At the end of the first round the teams switch and the defenders become the attackers. When both rounds are complete the team with the most points wins! Assault is available on all of the original maps, Origin and Collider.Gatekeeper:This is our second hawk-only gameplay mode and adds a bit of order to the chaos of Dogfight. Playing like a sports game in space or in the sky players will pick up a ball and attempt to fly it through several rings. Each ring the ball carrier flies through increases his potential score by one. Once he has flown through all of the rings he must then fly through the central gate to score the points, all while the opposing team is trying to shoot him down. Gatekeeper is available on all of the original maps, Origin, Collider, and the new Dogfight/Gatekeeper maps Breaker and Flotilla.Deathmatch Arena:Many in the community called for Deathmatch on foot and this new mode is a direct answer to them. Arena matches are fast paced free for all battles where the gear is dropped in from above automatically so all you have to worry about is killing the other players. Since the respawn and drop pod speeds have been significantly increased there is little downtime when you die. This, combined with the generally smaller maps and unpredictable placement of buildings makes for a frantic gameplay experience! Deathmatch Arena is available on Glade, Origin, Relay, Orbital, Junction, Conduit, Outlands, Basin, and Narrows.Three New Build & Battle Loadouts:

"Trooper" is a loadout that is designed specifically to focus on troop vs. troop combat!

"Light-Weight" is a well balanced loadout that does NOT include larger vehiclels like the Hawk and Ox Tank!

And the "Speeder" loadout focuses on fast vehicle combat and does NOT the Vulture Jetpack!
Ground Pounder, Heavyweight and and Lone Wolf are all seeing slight revisions too!Tool Tips:This may seem like a simple convenience change, but one we think is an important improvement. To help players navigate the uplink we’ve added tooltips to the icons on the menu, and to most of the sub-menu options. One of the most notable features of this change is that now you can see exactly what Build and Battle parts are in a loadout before you start a game. Recommended Player Counts:Recommended player counts are a handy way of deciding what maps will play best with the number of players you have. Or you can throw caution to the wind and stuff 32 players into the small maps. It’s your choice, and now we’ve made it easier.New National Clan Banners:There was a request on the forums for some banners for countries in the Middle East, so we included Kuwait, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Rock them if you live there, or you just want to represent your heritage.More Pickups & Rift Barrels:We got some really great feedback that the extra pickups and barrels in the new Cypress maps were a hit, so our designers have gone back through all of the old maps and added lots of new pickups. This was a huge fan request and we’re glad we could make it happen.M.A.W. Rocket Launcher:Previously troops didn’t really have a lot of options for dealing with the zippy Sidewinder, it was basically ‘don’t stand in the open’, and ‘hope they dismount’. Or maybe you were lucky and had a few proximity mines on hand. Now the M.A.W. locks onto the heat signature of the Sidewinder giving troops on foot a way to deal with the jetbike. This adds a new layer of utility to the M.A.W. and a new layer of complexity for the Sidewinder driver. With no method to scrub the incoming missile, the driver is going to need to use his wits and the terrain to avoid destruction. This change has a dramatic impact on ‘Sidewinder Races’ in the new CTF.Grinder:The Bruiser skill has been replaced with the Grinder skill, allowing you to start the match with a grinder. We’ve also made it spin up a bit faster and given it a slight range extension.Galloway Revolver:The pistol has had a slight boost to headshot damage, both in and out of OTS!More Score & Time Options:With the changes to the capture rules in CTF in 1.03 we wanted to allow for higher scoring games. Now you can go as high as 15. We also heard that you wanted more flexibility with the Zones score limit options so we’ve added 2500, 5000 and 25000(!) limits. In addition there are several new game length options so you can dial in your perfect game length and these are totally adjustable on our servers. This gives us the power to make these changes based on player feedback without the need for an update!In-game scoreboard in Deathmatch and Dogfight:Checking the score in the modes where you were forced to spawn in used to be a drag. The only way you could see it was to open the uplink while everyone else in the game was climbing over each other to be the first one to kill you. Now the scores are displayed in the game without having to take your fingers off the trigger.XP Payouts for Tier 2 and 3 in Zones:Previously there wasn’t much personal reward for sticking around to get your zones up to rank 2 or 3; XP was only paid out on the initial capture. Now you’ll get XP for each rank you help secure. So stick around and help your team hold the zone while you collect XP!Only Clan Leaders & Officers can Initiate a Clan Match:There was some concern from clan leaders that rogue members were able to create unauthorized clan matches which could have a negative impact on the clans W/L ratio. Now the clan tag options are unavailable to anyone but a clan officer or leader.Cake and Fist Icons removed:We removed the cake and fist icons from the game list leaving only the skull icon. Putting a cake icon on a game was a big neon sign that basically said 'fresh meat'. Now new players will know when a game is probably too rough for them, and veterans (all you blue 50+ players) will be able to join the widest number of games possible.PlayStation Store Button:A PlayStation Store button has been added to the uplink to make it easy to find new DLC content! More Rift Energy in Homeworlds:We’ve heard the request for more Rift Energy while in each of the multiplayer Homeworlds. Now you will start with quite a bit more! This should help speed up the rate that you can build stuff!Starhawk Specific Network Scanner:To help aid players in debuging their home networks, the Starhawk 1.04 Update includes a new network connection scanner that will trigger automatically in the event of a failed network connection. Certainly disconnects from the internet can happen for a wide variety of reasons, but based on all of the data we have collected, the vast majority of them are related to port blockage on a player's home network. The new network scanner will inform you of any ports that maybe blocked that are negatively impacting your Starhawk connection.Prospector Tuning & Create Game Changes:We’ve modified how damage is scaled with 2-4 player games. No, four player games are still challenging, but much more manageable. In addition we fixed an issue that was causing certain tough enemies to spawn less than the desired amount in games with less than 4 players. To put the icing on these changes we’ve also increased the XP payout in co-op mode. And to make Prospector games easier to start and join we’ve given you the ability to set a game name, difficulty and make the game public or private. Public games will now show up on the game list.Quickmatch Improvements:We've added all three new game modes as well as Prospector mode to the Quickmatch menu to make finding them a snap! Rage Quit Penalty:Nobody likes a sore loser (unless it’s in a hilarious youtube video) so players who rage quit the game while it is in progress will now post a loss. We know that there are times and circumstances where players should be allowed to quit out and we have allowed for that in this new system. Players will not take the quit penalty if they leave in the first 5 minutes of joining a game, if they have very low skill score, or have earned 0XP so far in the match. In addtion we have made this all tuneable on the server so that we can make adustments to the system to ensure that its accomplishing our goal of enforcing good sportsmanship.Up Next Display:And because we recognized that the only way you could tell what map was next was to load into it AND we recognized that maybe you didn’t want to play that one AND we recognized that the only way out was to take a quit penalty we added the next round details to the intermission screen. Between rounds the map, loadout and mode will be displayed in the upper right hand corner. No more surprises when the CTF game you joined turns into TDM!

Whew... That's a ton of new stuff!
The 1.04 Update drops on September 25th!

Friday, August 10, 2012 At 2:03PM
The 1.03.001 Update for Starhawk was deployed during server maintenance today, August 10 at 2pm Central time and included the following changes:

Two new maps on the planet Cypress.

Prestige Levels.

New space station homeworld "Waypoint".

Team balance fixes.

Updated voice chat system.

PTT (push-to-talk) option.

Vulture Jet-Pack eject.

Rift Barrels on Mini-Map.

Misc. Bug Fixes.

Ranked Option.

Skills shortcut on respawn screen.

Display of Build & Battle icons while respawning.

Display nearby Build & Battle structures.

Cooldowns for Host kick-player and team-switch.

Interactive music update.

Capture the Flag scoring change.

Top-Sorted customization unlocks.

Two New Cypress Maps:The biggest addtions in this update are the two new awesome maps on the swamp world of Cypress. For more details on the FREE Cypress Map pack that is included in the Starhawk 1.03 Update, CLICK HERE to read a PlayStation blog post written by LightBox Interactive's President, Dylan Jobe.

Prestige Levels:In the initial version of Starhawk, we supported levels 1-50. To be quite honest, we thought that would have the player community covered for quite some time. However, we had underestimated the rate at which people were going to get through the levels so we had to accelerate the release of our prestige levels for those players who are above 50. The Prestige levels in Starhawk are not numbers; they’re a Greek symbol ranking of ALPHA through OMEGA. The Greek symbol will be displayed by your name in-game. These are very hard ranks to achieve and the jump from level 50 to ALPHA is steep because these are really intended for the hard-core community.New Space Homeworld “Waypoint”:In Starhawk, Homeworld’s are like lobbies. They are 3D levels where you and your friends can go to party-up, talk tactics and then pick a game to join. This new Homeworld is a cool space station. We added this because we really wanted players to enter a deep-space “lobby” to mess around in.Team-Balance Fixes:There were some bugs in the party/clan cohesion system where servers would keep parties and clans together in *ALL* cases and this resulted in some brutally mis-matched games. This has been fixed! There were some other issues that resulted in messed-up team balance and we have resolved those as well. Should be a ton better!Revamped Voice Chat System:During the initial launch of Starhawk we received reports from the player community about voice-chat dropping after a few games or in some cases, the voice-chat would simply not work. As you can imagine in a deep, team-based game like Starhawk, voice-chat is critical. So we did a ton of digging to find-out what the issue was and it ended up requiring a change to our Client/Server voice system. This change makes the VOIP far more stable and resolves the voice connection issues that some players had been experiencing in the past.Push-to-Talk Option:This was requested by so many players, and in concert with the revamped Voice Chat System, the PTT option really is a great addition. Now players have the option to have their microphone turn on when they press L3 rather than automatically when they talk. I guess, too many players were being yelled at by their Moms, had crying babies in the background, or hell, maybe both! You can find the PTT option in the Audio Settings menu in the Uplink.Vulture Jet-Pack Eject:Players are now allowed to dismount while flying around in a Starhawk if they have a handy dandy Vulture Jet-Pack equipped.Rift Barrels on Mini-Map:To help aid players and their use of the Build & Battle system, we decided to add small icons on the mini-map where we’ve placed the Rift Energy Caches — those are the barrels that you shoot that burst open with Rift Energy that you can spend to build your arsenal of destruction. The blips on the map are displayed when the barrels are active and are *NOT* displayed when the barrels are waiting to respawn.Bug Fixes:These are not as super-sexy as free maps, but the fact that they are fixed will really help the community. We also addressed some host migration issues, a number of crashes and network instability issues, and even the laggy pick-up bug was fixed as well.Ranked Option:Another feature that was requested by players was really two requests related to how games post stats. The first point brought up by players was regarding stat-padding going on in password protected games, and since those games were password protected, they should not count as real ranked games. Now, you can still have a very private game with a password but your stats will not post. Also, if you are having a Clan vs. Clan game you have the option to turn stats on or off — because it might be a practice or scrimmage. Furthermore, if you are doing a Clan Scrimmage (your clan in both Rifter & Outcast slots) the stats will *NOT* post to the server. This is to keep clans from stat-padding in locked-out games.Skills Shortcut at the Respawn Screen:Players really wanted a quick way to change skills without having to leave the respawn screen. So…we added a little tab in the upper right corner of the respawn screen that allows you to press TRIANGLE and jump right to the skills menu! Oh, and we also now allow you to change your skill at other places in the Uplink instead of only in-game.Build & Battle Icons While Respawning:Another thing we did to help players when using the Build & Battle system was to display a simple graphic icon of each of the structures on the battlefield as the player is drop-poding into combat. This simple change really helps players know what structures are already built and helps them make better use of the stuff their team has built. Not to mention it helps let you know immediately where you should run when you crack-open your drop-pod!Display Nearby Build & Battle Structures:There are now some new visuals to help players recognize Build & Battle structures that are built nearby. For starters, any time you place a structure; Starhawk very clearly displays how many are nearby. It also now highlights those nearby structures on your map *AND* displays some markers on the edge of the screen to help inform you that not only is there a structure nearby, but which direction it is.Cooldowns for Host Kick and Team Switch:There were a number of exploits that could occur in the original version of Starhawk where players would change teams rapidly or a host would quickly kick a ton of players. That can no longer occur because we track when you perform one of these actions and block you from doing it again for a set amount of time — and we can tune the time if we need to.Interactive Music Update:After playing Starhawk for so many hours, we really felt that the music was not kicking-in as frequently as we wanted it to. There were many times when you’d be in the heat of combat and there’d be no music at all. We felt this hurt the pacing and in fact some players in our community noticed the same thing. So the 1.03 Update includes some new tweaks to the interactive music system and the more frequent music makes a big difference.Capture the Flag Scoring Change:We’ve been playing CTF in Starhawk a ton here in the studio and we’ve always felt that there were too many games ending in draws or times when the match would get into awkward stalemates. So with the 1.03 Update, we have changed one of the key rules for CTF and one of the key contributors to the stalemates. Now, to score a point in CTF, you need to take the enemy flag back to your base — period. Your team’s flag does *NOT* need to be there for you to score. Now certainly, your team still needs to play defense because you don’t want the enemy team taking your flag and scoring, but this change makes the pacing so much better. Much faster and far fewer draws and stalemates.Sorting Unlocked Customization:Now this is more of a simple convenience thing but we changed the way the various characters and vehicle customization options are presented so that the unlocked ones are always displayed at the top of the list. Not a super-big change at all but I thought I’d include it here.Drop-Pod Upgrade:One of the things that we were experimenting with during our Starhawk playtests to help combat “base-ravaging” was to make the Drop-Pod more deadly. Our whole design goal with the drop-pod system was to make the act of respawning in your home base an incredibly powerful weapon. This was to help combat against “base-ravaging”. After a lot of review, and play testing and tweaking, we decided to upgrade the drop-pods to be more maneuverable *AND* have an increased impact radius. This along with some changes we made to the respawn timer really makes a huge positive impact on the reduction of “base-ravaging”.Custom Music via XMB:In Warhawk we added support for your own music and we’re doing the same in Starhawk. The 1.03 Update now allows you to play your own music through the XMB. So if you want to experience Starhawk’s unique Build & Battle gameplay while blaring Pat Benatar you totally can!

If anyone is on the fence about this game, just go buy it! It's a ton of fun and the DLC is free! Support the devs who make amazing exclusives for the PS3. Chances are we will see a Warhawk 2 out of them in the future for PS4.

I will play the single player when its free with PS+ but I had so little fun with the beta I don't know if I will play the online. Hit detection was terrible and the auto-aim was awful. I played Warhawk for about a year but this game has a lot of other things I liked but in the end...the very basic fundementals of shooting people and the fighting just didn't work for me. I am super excited to play the single player though and experience that at least. I do see lots of promise and I wish other devs gave this attention and features to their games as this one did but I'm just sad I didn't enjoy the beta at all.

ya this game is epic. I play starhawk and borderlands 2 everyday. With borderlands 2 just coming out (which is very addictive game) I still haft to play starhawk. I must say it is one of THE best PS3 games out now. I wish they advertised it better upon it's release. Hopefully the rest of the Warhawk community will buy this game. If your iffy on this game BUY IT! There is no game like this on any system right now. It is THE PS3 hidden gem of this gen.

I decided to subscribe to PS+ for three months so I could download all the starhawk extras for free. The Grizzlys are insane. It makes the game feel completely different. For anyone who hasn't played the game in a while, pick it back up and give it another try.

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